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Grand New Party Part Deux

Ross Douthat, senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine, and Reihan Salam, associate editor at the Atlantic and senior editor at New America, discuss their bookGrand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

[25] is mostly correct. I believe the welfare system needs to be dissolved slowly over time, with basically just SS as an insurance policy (by Obama wanting to turn it into a welfare program by raising caps and limiting peoples access will lead to its ultimate doom, the reason for its success was that it was an insurance policy that everyone paid into and collected from - same problem with the privatization people who never itake into account the variability of the length of peoples lives). Public welfare should be something temporary otherwise it does no one any benefits in the long run... it just creates a dependent population and promotes mediocrity. I know this won't go over well in this almost completely liberal audience, but so be it.

KC is right. And these are the guys David Brooks is now stuck with hawking as "the best new voices" in the conservative movement. It's like being stuck with insisting that diarrhea is the best new voice in the bowel movement. These poor shmoes are out of ideas. And excuses. But you have to give them credit - they are new blood. After that, nothing.

Two more fast-talking neo cons to add to our collection. If they can cram enough half-baked ideas into their 500 mile/hour monologs, maybe we won't hear what they're saying. Or remember enough to actually give it some thought.

Much of the crime issues of the 60's and 70's that the republicans campaigned to change were crimes of economics by those minorities and poor peoples who were negatively effected by much of Republican policy. Which came first? Couldn't one say that this is a brilliant strategy for maintaining political power.

the repub(gnant) party did it's job-- slavery is over. beyond that the party has long outlived its usefulness. their quasi-fascist fiefdom state of gov't-business collusion to drain all the capital from the working class to the management/owner class has rapidly disemboweled the strengths of our country-- an educated, upwardly mobile middle class.

Starving the public schools, privatizing access to higher education (funding) and health care, these two steps alone have, practically, economically enslaved both the parents & students graduating college.

the gop over-riding policy of ignoring facts and sticking to ideologically-driven legislation has lead us to a crumbling infrastructure, constantly closing hospitals, several recessions, loss of manufacturing, unbelievable personal and national debt, the list goes on.

The democrats are almost as bad because they don't stand up to the gop, they assist them & allow them to get away with these policies-- either because they are getting money from the same place or to allow the policies to blow up in their faces. Either way, it's bad for our country.

I'm all for the death of the gop. perhaps something better will rise from the ashes. Maybe we should all join the gop and go to the local meetings and seriously set this party on a better path!

I’d like to believe that HJS but even in this interview (as well as the way McCain speaks) government is the “boogie man” in need of constant reform instead of what’s really needed… repair. I smell another public/private partnership coming. Let’s throw some money at for-profits and GOP friendly churches, they’ll defend us from the free market and people telling us how to run our personal lives.

A weak effort to rebrand what is an inherint bias on the part of conservatives for laissez faire economic organization. The state, in that view, is an impediment, not a partner, for achieving that kind social-political organization. The best way to dupe the working class and the poor is to convince them that their interests are aligned with the wealthy and powerful, when in fact, they are at odds with one another. These guys offer a shallow analysis, as does David Brooks, of the circumstances afflicting not only the working class but our dwindling middle class.

The more cohesive families of the 50s were also more frequently single-income families. If broken families are disadvantaged today it's because it takes two incomes to maintain a household where before it took one. It may well be (does anyone ever talk about this?) that the introduction of women to the workforce has lowered wages by raising supply, but that's also reflective of a desire for independence and self-sufficiency in today's society that the good old days that this broken family crowing hearkens back to is completely out of step with.

I have to second comments #1 and Paulo. I've heard these guys speak before and thought "wow, I guess I'm just not getting it", but Paulo kind of nailed it. There is nothing to get. They are offering NOTHING. I know it's a waste of pity, but I feel sorry for the GOP. In the same way I feel badly for Britney Spears. I know it's wrong, but they're just so... messed up.

Let's see what 8 years of GOP rule has gotten us, shall we? Heaps of dead soldiers and other people. Near five dollar a gallon gas. Ridiculously expensive health insurance. Trillions of dollars in debt. A broken military. A much more deeply divided country. The injection of religion into places it doesn't belong. A federal bench that seethes with contempt for the very people it is supposed to serve. Government agencies unable to perform their functions. And the economy is in the toilet.

No other industrialized country in the world has a "free market" approach to health care, and nearly every one of those countries ranks far above the US in critical health indicators like infant mortality and longevity, diabetes, obesity etc, and spend far less. Why do conservatives (including these ones) persist in claiming that a free market model is the way to go, both from a cost, and outcomes perspective?

That nauseous feeling that you have when listening to conservatives that constantly pat themselves on the back for "successes" like welfare reform is not from the cheap junk food that you were forced to eat for breakfast (because you couldn't afford fruit.) It is because the lies are so intricately weaved into the language of people like this that it is an affront to the consciousness of the listener. Conservatives in this country just DON'T GET IT.

Unfortunately, as soon as any pundit says "Americans are generally happy with the way our healthcare system works", he loses all credibility, and everything he says thereafter is suspect. That's simply not true, and only elitists think it is.

The "conservative" welfare state is nothing new. And the allusion to Bismarck is, of course, accurate. It is important to note where the Bismarckian conservative welfare state lead. Conservative, or more accurately, paternalist, versions of welfare generally tend toward exclusionary images of welfare that often amount to a sort of "taking care of our own mentality." A review of Mark Mazower's account of Nazi welfare policies in his history of Europe's twentieth century, "The Dark Continent" is instructive. The successful social welfare regimes that are supportive of the working class more often derived out of labor-based political parties. The Scandinavian examples are the classics of the field.

I recommend that these authors go back and read a bit more about the history of social welfare and social policy.

He seems to be making a false causation argument when it should be a correlation argument about family breakdown and economic situation. Anyone who's been in hard times knows that financial hardship is one of the biggest stressors on a relationship.

Excellent comment #1; that will probably the best comment of the week. However, there is one aspect of all of this you’ve left out. It will be difficult for any Republican run government to get Americans whom support them to trust government again. The party attempted to show that the free market was the best way by deliberately underfunding or mismanaging public programs. And after thirty years or so of horribly mismanaging government programs and leading a very successful campaign to make any program designed to benefit the people an entitlement on par with abortion and gay marriage, hearts and minds won’t be changed easily.

This essentially combines the worst ideas of the Republican Party and merges it with the worst ideas of the Democratic Party. It ensures the meddling of the government in people's personal as well as economic lives. What will we have left then?

What is happening is that the white guy who the GOP could count on (the Archie Bunkers of this world), who was conned by the GOP into thinking that most Democratic policies would help minorities, women and immigrants AT HIS expense, is now waking up and now realizing that it was the GOP policies that are the real detriment to him.

What he has seen is crony capitalism by the GOP. He has seen hypocrisy, with a party that preaches a free market as is if it is some natural law in physics that can't be tampered with so that when he falls on his face, it is part of the "vagaries of the free market." Fine, but then he sees corporations bailed out the government and the very tight relationship that exists with members of government and corporations.

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